What we like to wear

Overall, British respondents were more likely to spend money on BDSM clothing than people from the USA (The UK mean for spending on BDSM Clothing was 59%, the US mean was 52%), with the exception of leather – where the USA was 2% more likely to have spent on leather (not a big difference really).

Brits seem to like their shoes and boots more than Yanks: just under two-thirds of Americans have spent money on fetish footwear whilst just over three-quarters of British respondents said they’d spent in this area.

The most striking difference was in Latex/rubber. US respondents said they were a lot less likely to have spent money on latex/rubber than their UK equivalent: Less than a quarter (22%) of people who said they were from the USA had invested in this area, whilst more than a third (37%) of UK respondents had spent on latex/rubber.

However people who spend on rubber spend big. I tried to calculate an average amount spent on each clothing area by taking the midpoint of each range I’d asked people to say their total spending on an item fell into (other than the top range “more than £/$10,000”, where I just used £/$10,000) and then dividing the total of reported spending by the number of people who’d said they’d spent money on that type of clothing to give some sort of average spend per person. To enable comparison I converted $ to £ at the date of writing (26 July 2015 $1=£0.64). Not only do exchange rates rise and fall, but buying power in the US tends to be larger than in the UK, or so I’m told – so these figures are very debatable.

What they show is that people who said they had bought latex/rubber wear spent an awful lot more on it than survey completers said they spent on any other area of fetish wear. Rubberists, since their interest in BDSM started, said they had spent an average of £739 on rubber and latex clothing (£795 for UK respondents and £682 (equivalent = £1,066) for USA respondents. That’s 56% more than the next highest spending category (Other).

Up to 384 people answered this question with up to 104 saying they lived in the USA and up to 261 saying they came from the UK. Respondents from other countries were included under “all” in this analysis but otherwise excluded.